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| Speakers: | Robert W. Merry, President and publisher, Congressional Quarterly, Inc.; author, Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition |
|---|---|
| Nancy E. Soderberg, Vice president for multilateral affairs, International Crisis Group; author, The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might | |
| Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer professor of international affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; author, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy | |
| Presider: | Paul Kennedy, Director, International Security Studies; Dilworth professor of history, Yale University |
October 26, 2005
Council on Foreign Relations
Council on Foreign Relations
New York, NY
PAUL KENNEDY: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Good evening. I hope my voice is carrying to the back. If it doesn't, you guys at the back have got the job -- the noble job -- of making me elevate my voice.
I'm Paul Kennedy, professor of history at Yale, and I have the honor to be chairing this evening's discussion on American power -- its uses and consequences. I have more instructions in front of me than the elder Moltke had when carrying out the Schlieffen plan in September of 1914. Let me --
MR. : (Inaudible) -- this goes better! (Laughter.)
KENNEDY: This will depend upon the people in the front line. But let me just mention to you that this is a council on-the-record discussion. It's webcast. It's a very tight program, and however genial I may seem to some of you, I've got to be fairly ruthless tonight. We have three distinguished authors coming to talk about their brand new or very new works on the uses and consequences of American power.
You have their bios, ladies and gentlemen, in the printout of information that you picked up or were sent as members of the council. So I'm not going to waste your time or theirs by reading. You know Bob Merry is author of one of our works, "The Sands of Empire," at the Congressional Quarterly, formerly at the Wall Street Journal.
Nancy will be well known to many of you, both in her former official capacities and now International Crisis Group here in New York -- the author of the "Super Power Myth," which is the second of the works we're going to look at. And another academic acquaintance of mine, Steve Walt, professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, author of, "Taming American Power."
I've brought along all my copies, but I see they're multiple ones for sale in the hallway, so I won't even wave them around to increase their sales. There they are, out there. This does seem, ladies and gentlemen, to me to be the season for questions being posed about American power. It's so inevitable, given the circumstances in the world outside and in Washington, that this should be so. So I'm not going to spend any more time other than noting -- as I did just doing a scan of recent works -- that again and again, certain words come up or have come up in the past year or so.
And they form parts of the spectrum of the critique -- military overstretch, fiscal recklessness, cultural arrogance, failure to understand the Arab world, pursuit of a neo-conservative agenda that could never properly work. Many of these scenes will go in and out of the three works we're looking at tonight, and although our speakers have promised me on a teleconference we had that we're all going to be brief. And it's probably best that each of them give like two major points as to what they think they're contributing to the debate.
Then, the only thing I would further add is my interest in all of the works in, shall we say, a critical -- (inaudible). They think something has gone wrong -- something has gone very badly wrong, and they want to express different reactions to that and different ways of getting out of it. It's interesting that there are very few works around or that have come out in the last brief while which seem to be defending the neocon position. And quite a number of those who defended it a few years ago have disappeared. Possibly they knew that Bob Merry was advancing upon them from the right flank and Nancy from the left.
What we're going to do -- what I'm going to do, ladies and gentlemen, is to begin a discourse with the three authors and speakers, and take it to 6:30. And then open it up to a Q&A session. And I'll find part seven of the Schlieffen plan and tell you what the rules are for the Q&A sessions.
You have speakers as listed in the program, but actually, I thought I would, if I may, Nancy, go first to you as being in a way the person -- the most immediate who, because participating very centrally in the unfolding of U.S. policies in the '90s and then reflecting upon that in your book. And then, looking at the policies that we've had over the past few years and being pretty critical about it.
And so, if someone in the audience doesn't ask it, I'm, sometime this hour going to ask, well, what would the Clinton administration have done differently to 9/11 than the present administration? But that's just an advance warning of a question which is likely going to come up -- because I'm going to ask it. (Laughter.)
What I would invite you to offer to the audience, is a couple of remarks about this view you have of a superpower.
Robert Merry, Paul Kennedy, Nancy Sodeberg, and Steve Walt.
NANCY SODERBERG: Well, first of all, thank you and thanks to Richard for bringing together this discussion. And I think it's incredibly timely given the debate in the world and the former officials who are beginning to speak their mind and the fact that we've hit the 2000 dead in Iraq mark. I think a lot of Americans are trying to figure out, what is the right use of American power?
My own sense is -- to preview your upcoming question is -- I'm a big believer in chaos over conspiracy. The Clinton administration had a hard time figuring out how to use American power in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. And the Bush administration struggled to do so after 9/11.
I would argue, not surprisingly, that the Clinton administration ultimately got it right after two-and-a-half years of really struggling. And the Bush administration got it wrong after nine months of struggling and 9/11. My book is called, "The Superpower Myth." And the superpower myth is the dangerous fallacy that because the United States is the most powerful nation on earth, it is all powerful. It can bend the world to its will without partners. And we need to once again become the great persuader, not just the great enforcer.
Anti-Americanism has spiked to unprecedented levels. Now, I don't really care if the French like us or don't like us, but if you're trying to get a global coalition to end terrorism and end nonproliferation, have tough rules for the road, we simply have to work with other partners.
The good news is that I think they're getting the message. It's not an accident that you have Powell's former chief of staff, Brent Scowcroft, and others, beginning to say, wait a minute. This is wrong. This is dangerous. We really need to begin to shift policy.
And I think reality has an annoying way of seeping into the administration's thoughts. And I think they are now -- you don't hear this, you know, axis of evil, us-versus-them mentality anymore. What you hear is, we need partners. We need alliances.
Extraordinary thing happened last summer. They allowed -- a lot of people think that the International Criminal Court was actually the fourth leg of the axis of evil. And they actually let the situation into Darfur get referred to the International Criminal Court. It's a little bit inside baseball, but that's huge.
They wouldn't do carrots. John Bolton, who was in charge of arms control for four years -- very proud of saying, I don't do carrots. Guess what? We're all the sudden doing carrots in both Iran and North Korea.
So I would argue that there was a very dangerous, costly four years. We're in Iraq for the foreseeable future at more or less the same levels. By the end of it, we'll have lost more people than in 9/11 in Iraq. Americans will debate whether that was worth the cost. But the hubris and the lead-up to the war has made America less safe, not more.
I call them the hegemons, primarily Cheney and Rumsfeld. They're not neocons. They're radical ideologues who believe in world hegemony. It has not worked. It's been a costly experiment. And I think the pendulum in the next three years, whether, you know, after 2008 it's a democrat or a republican, you'll see a comeback to a much more sensible policy where America's once again the great persuader.
KENNEDY: I was interested in the time horizon you just mentioned here -- in the next three years -- because you're much more of a political animal than I in your thinking in electoral terms -
SODERBERG: (Off mike.)
KENNEDY: Well, I was going to pull out a contrast list with the argument, as I understood it, in Steve's work, which is that -- that regardless of 9/11 and regardless of a Bush administration, which did not attend or didn't pay much care to its foreign relations -- regardless of that, it is a kind of longer-term element in international affairs that a hegemon, or the largest of the great powers, attracts animosity, suspicion, some mistrust, possibly beginnings of balancing or trying to think of what they can do against this hegemon -- this 500-pound gorilla.
And I guess, the question I had to Steve to open things up -- but then I want you to come interrupt, please, with a remark on your own agenda. But my question was actually the one we raised in or telephone pre-conference, which is, you lay out a very wonderful way in this, "Taming American Power," the way in -- the ways in which other nations and other combinations will begin to move against the U.S, almost like some automatic law of the physics of great power relations -- the balancing, which will go on.
So the question will be -- would this balancing, would this circumspection with which the Chinese government views us or the way in which certain European states try to balance American power, would that happen different had the Iraq war not happened, or had 9/11 and the Iraq war not happened? Is there something -- the very fact that when you look at the physical attributes of American power by the year 2000, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the kind of faltering of the Japanese economy, it was clearly the leading power by a long way.
So was there going to be other countries moving against the U.S. simply because it was what it was, or did they move and are they moving still in their discreet and less than discreet ways against U.S. policies because of the present administration and what it represents?
STEPHEN WALT: Yes -- yes, to both. (Laughter.)
KENNEDY: You mean yes and yes.
WALT: And -- yes and yes. I mean, we often forget that concerns about American power didn't begin with President Bush's inauguration in 2001. The French were talking about hyper power back in the 1990s. Gerhard Schroeder was talking about American unilateralism in '97, '98. So the concern with, you know, the 500-pound or 800-pound gorilla predates the Bush administration. And I do think that is, to some extent, hardwired into the international system. Whenever one country is as powerful as the United States now is, it's going to make others uncomfortable. They're going to wonder how it's going to use its capabilities. They're going to be affected by our actions, even when our actions are well intentioned and benevolent. And that's going to make them uncomfortable.
That said, we have a couple of advantages. Many countries around the world do not have powerful, ideological opposition to what the United States stands for. Indeed, even some countries that don't like very much about our foreign policy still like aspects of American society, aspects of American democracy, have great admiration for American science, technology, higher education, other achievements like that.
We also have the geopolitical advantage that we are a long way away from most of the other major power centers. And they still tend to worry a fair bit about each other, which makes them want to have the United States as an ally. That's a way of saying, despite that structural propensity for concerns about American power, there's a lot that the United States can do to mitigate those tendencies and to build useful partnerships with others.
The bad news, of course, as Nancy said, was that we haven't done very many of those things over the last three or four years. I would not, in other words, let the Bush administration off the hook. They took a situation where the United States, in fact, had to behave with a certain degree of wisdom and restraint and did exactly the opposite -- behaved with very little restraint whatsoever, believing -- again, they had a world view -- believing that all the United States had to do was demonstrate to the rest of the world how powerful it was and how resolute it was, and everyone would simply fall into line.
And I think we saw signs even before 9/11 that that wasn't working. We had the brief moment after 9/11 where everyone rallied around the United States -- even the French -- nous sommes tous Americains -- the day after 9/11. And then that, of course, gets squandered yet again in what will, I think, be subsequently viewed as a great tragedy for American foreign policy -- the detour into Iraq and all that has followed from there.
If there's a silver lining in this, is that I think it is possible to rebuild that relatively quickly if the United States, again, returns to a foreign policy that shows a little bit more deference for others; as Nancy said, worries a little bit more about persuasion; cares a lot more about legitimacy and how our actions appear to the rest of the world so that something like -- when something like Abu Ghraib happens, you actually get a high-level resignation or two as a way of signifying that, yes, in fact, the United States of America thinks that sort of conduct is reprehensible. It's not something that we stand for.
If we're trying to win hearts and minds around the world, it seems to me it's something we ought to be doing. That's the sort of policy change you have to have going forward, as well.
KENNEDY: It struck me, reading the three books about a month or so ago, that you all end up -- as do most of the books in this genre -- with a silver lining. That is to say, you end up by saying, but if there's an alteration of course and if we just, you know, use multilateral instruments more cleverly and if we just balance budget and if we just recognize that we can't be everywhere. If this, this and this is done, we can improve our situation, and the United States will remain where we think it should be.
So there's silver linings in all of these. But it seemed to me that Bob Merry's was, in some ways, more dramatic, because as I read you, Bob, you're equally critical of Clinton and the Bush administration -- or at least the Bush neocons for what you regard as a fallacy of thinking that you can impose the American way of life or American ideals across the globe. And you were ending up in a much more conservative -- kind of Burkian conservative sense.
Indeed, it is you who quote Burke, I think -- that wonderful phrase where Burke said, I dread our power -- I dread the greatness of our power. He's talking about Great Britain. Was it you or --
WALT: Me.
KENNEDY: I was searching -- both of you used Burke.
ROBERT MERRY: I going to use it next, though, but I'll credit your source. (Laughter.)
KENNEDY: Well, you can see the way I'm going. You worry that, rather like Burke, as quoted by Steve Walt, that there will be a responsive to American policies. And the more that we flex and move around and discover that we have great strategic interests in Azerbaijan, the more in the end we will pay for it so that your silver lining -- your way out of this -- is to say, let's go back to a reasonable measurement of the places in the world which are truly vital to U.S. interests and not have this universalist approach, which you find was there with the Clinton administration in one way and was there -- with -- (inaudible) -- with the neocons another way. Have I got you right?
MERRY: I think you've got me substantially right. I think one of the points that would make is that where I part company, I think, with my colleagues here and probably with many people out in the audience and others among the intelligentsia in this government, is that I happen to believe that the United States and the West is locked in a civilizational conflict with Islam -- or at vast elements of Islamic civilization.
It's not just, in my view, evildoers or even people that you might call terrorists, who have stepped outside of their own culture in order to justify their attacks on Americans. And it's clear to me that this is a view that is very hard to swallow on the part of a lot of people. And I think the reason for that is that it clashes with the fundamental, underlying philosophical premise that's been driving American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. And it can go by many names, but it's American exceptionalism.
And you've got me exactly right in terms of my critique of both the Bush administration and the Clinton administration. I read Nancy's book, for example, and when she talks about spreading democracy in the Middle East and the importance of gender equality in the Middle East and putting pressure on Putin in Russia and all these things, she sounds to me almost exactly like Condoleezza Rice. So you have to ask yourself -- I mean, it seems to me that both of them feel that America hasn't really quite redeemed its mission in the world until Saudi women are driving around in sports cars with their hair flowing in the wind.
So you have to ask yourself, what's the debate here, then? What's the debate between the people who adhere to the Clintonites and the people who might want to defend -- not on this podium -- but might want to defend Bush? And I don't think there's much of a debate there. I think the fundamental debate goes much, much deeper. It's philosophical. It's about the ideas that have been driving American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. And it really was the emergence -- which I discuss at some length -- the emergence of Wilsonianism to a degree that we hadn't seen since Woodrow Wilson's stroke. (Laughter.)
KENNEDY: Well, that's a dramatic way to end your few minutes. (Laughter.)
You, of course, lead -- your book leads the reader to pose the inevitable question, which is -- well, there's a good argument in your work. I really like you. I thought it was a real zinger, if you don't mind me saying so; it was just really wonderful, punchy. There's a good argument for restraint. There's a good argument for moving away from the universalistic or the crusading style and actually beliefs. But the big question that remains is, how then do you order where we should be with considerable resources and interests and where we shouldn't be.
I couldn't help -- just shortly after I put on your book, I reached for John Elliot's wonderful biography of the great Spanish statesman, Olivares, in the early 17th Century. And Olivares and his fellow counselors sent this memorandum to Philip the IV of Spain. And they said, you know, we are far to stretched and all over the place. And we somehow ought to rein ourselves in. We have to balance our resources with what we can do. And then second paragraph said, the problem is, if we pull out of the Netherlands, there will be repercussions in Germany -- in the middle of the 30 Years War. And if we pull out of the Mediterranean, there will be repercussions in the Netherlands and the Rhineland. If we pull out of the Indies, we'll lose our resources.
So by the end of the day, they were paralyzed. They could see the overwhelming argument that the relationship between means and ends had become distorted. But they couldn't move on. They were paralyzed in proposing what to do about it in practical terms. Are you getting people throwing that sort of question at you?
MERRY: What would we do in practical terms?
KENNEDY: Yes, like abandon Africa or something like that?
MERRY: Well, I -
KENNEDY: This is on the record. I told you --
MERRY: I have so, but I'm not going to quote Joe Alsop, who said that the whole continent of Africa should be under three feet of water. I thought that was an outrageous statement when I did my Alsop book.
KENNEDY: Thinking of Louisiana.
MERRY: I believe that America has to be in the world. I believe that America has to be in the world powerfully for two reasons. Number one, we have too many interests in the world not to be, and we have too much power in the world not to attempt to exercise that power in behalf of both our interests and world stability.
But I believe in terms of the expenditure of American blood, which I hold sacred, it should be expended only for three things. Number one, to protect America's vital self-interest; to protect the security of the West, because after all, we are the core state of western civilization; and third, to maintain to the fullest extent possible, stability in key strategic locations of the world. And I emphasis strategic. That does not include Somalia. That does not include the Balkans.
That does not include Iraq for the simple reason that we are in civilization war, in my view. That's very debatable.But in a civilizational war, unlike territorial wars or ideological wars, they're very difficult to adjudicate. They're very difficult to negotiate, because you're talking about people's identity. And people don't compromise their identity if they can -- they never do. They might compromise in terms of adjusting to reality, but they never compromise their identity.
That's why you have suicide bombers. And so I don't believe that in a civilizational war, the smartest thing in the world is the plant the flag of one civilization into the heartland soil of another. I think that's very incendiary.
KENNEDY: So far the plan is terrifically, we've gone over the Meuse River. We're approaching Liege. In a couple of minutes, I'm going to open it up to you, ladies and gentlemen, but I thought that since -- since Bob went last, we would should just ask Nancy and then Steve if you have -- anything which has been said since you spoke, which you want to add a cent or two?
SODERBERG: Yes, this is a discussion about the use of American power. And I think I would disagree with the clash-of-civilization type argument. We're not in a fight with Islam. We're in a fight against Islamic extremism. The Indonesians aren't the ones who are spawning al Qaeda -- the Bangladeshis, the Nigerians. The world's most populous Muslim nations are not its extremist, you know, Arab regimes that have been -- as Martin Indyk, the former assistant secretary of state and ambassador to Israel has written -- you know, a grand bargain that if we have access to cheap oil and a stable price of oil, then we won't interfere in their affairs.
And that came back to bite us on September 11th. And I think we do need to begin to try and put a -- as a major priority, the root causes of September 11th, which is not a clash of civilization, but rather extremists that have taken hold in very repressive societies in the Arab world. And I think, when you look at power, I would actually agree with Bob's definition of where we should use force in the larger perspective. I would certainly put the Balkans on strategic interest -- having fought two world wars in Europe. But I think we miscalculate when we're only looking at military power.
And this gets back to the power of persuasion. And often, our power can be best used through persuasion and economics and sanctions and our moral power. And we need to get back to that. Who today, for instance, if you had the Tiananmen Square revolt with students wanting to build a statue to their ideals, what student movement today would build the Statue of Liberty? No one. We need to get back to that so that we can use our full realm of power. It doesn't always have to be the military.
KENNEDY: Okay, that doesn't sound that's the sort of thing that Steve is going to say as his two cents.
WALT: No, I'm going to cleverly position myself right in-between my two colleagues up here.
KENNEDY: I'm there. (Laughter.)
WALT: I certainly don't want to be on, say, the left end.
No, I -- a couple of points -- occasionally, when I listen to Democratic Party critiques of the Bush administration's foreign policy, they take the form of, we would do everything that they would do, only we would do it better. And one of the problems of where, I guess, I align myself a little bit with Bob is that I look at much of the -- I'll call it sort of classic, liberal internationalists foreign policy and it inevitably gets us involved telling the world how to live in lots of different places. And once you've made that step, it becomes very difficult to say no to, when someone says, well, we've got to transform these countries into democracies. And we've got to spread American ideals in lots of places. I actually do think that has generated some of the anti-Americanism we face. And it has certainly generated some of the extreme forms in places like the Middle East.
So in my book, I actually call for a return to a strategy of offshore balancing, where the United States significantly reduces its military footprint in lots of parts of the world, as a way of minimizing the degree of resentment and making other countries want to have us there rather than resenting having us there. I can say more about that, perhaps, in response to questions.
KENNEDY: Okay.
WALT: The other thing -- just one other point. The other thing I would emphasize is that we have to remember what American power can and cannot accomplish. And I'll stick to military power for the moment, but there's a lot more than that.
American military power is terrific at opposing aggression and reversing aggression by other countries. If you think of the first Gulf War, it's a beautiful demonstration of that. The American military is not very good at occupying other countries. It's not very good at spreading democracy. It's not very good nation building. That's like using a, you know, a chainsaw to slice your Thanksgiving turkey. It's just the wrong tool for the job.
So one of the things going forward is understanding the things we can do with our power, or which elements of our power, and the things we can't and use the right tools for the right task.
KENNEDY: Okay, thank you. If anybody else is expecting a phone call from their spouses concerning when the chicken should be put on -- I should have said this at the very beginning -- ladies and gentlemen, stamp on your cell phones or do something which prevents them from ringing.
Well, moving onto Q&A. And we'll do it for the next approximately 28, 27 minutes.
I would ask you, recall that we are on the record. So any state secrets you want to reveal will go everywhere. Even if we were off the record, it'd still go everywhere. (Laughter.) And I would like you, please, to identify yourself. And if your question is specific to one of our three authors and presenters, direct it to them. If it's for all three of them, please say that.
I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the long of list of tortures and heinous things I can do to anybody who instead of asking a question, offers a lengthy statement. You will regret it -- I was going to say for the rest of your life, but I don't think you're going to live very long as far as I can tell from these.
So please, to the point with a question, your identification and who you wish to address your question to.
Yes, sir, you had your hand up already.
QUESTIONER: My name's Richard --
Could you please speak -- there's a mobile mike. That's the only mobile we're allowing.
QUESTIONER: (Inaudible) -- Boston Journal editorial writer, therefore I am implicated by background with Bob Merry.
This question is addressed to Bob Merry.
This is the first -- Iraq is the first policy war of the all-volunteer armed forces era. I also wrote the reporter -- that commission that ended the draft.
This is an extremely important war to resolve in a way that does not scapegoat the military. I would like your thoughts on that question and on the question of American consent -- popular consent -- to an outcome that looks like less than victory.
MERRY: Well, I have to say that I was really struck by the coverage of the 2,000 casualty death in Iraq by the examples of the sacrifice of people who have been over one, two, three times in a row and then ultimately being killed the third time over. And what struck me was that we have -- we've basically hired out our military in a way, internally. And I think that for a time --
QUESTIONER: Can you explain that?
MERRY: Yeah. That the country at large does not have to sacrifice. Only the people who have been drawn into this military life are the ones who are going to make the sacrifice.
And what became clear is that there are certain areas where the sacrifice is very intense because there are a lot of people in certain military areas around the country where -- and certainly with Reserve units over there. And I think that for a time, that's what's sustaining this war. We are basically doing it on the backs of those people who found themselves unfortunate enough to be in that position.
But ultimately, the country morally will not allow that to be sustained. How long that will last, I don't know, but I think that it's not a sustainable situation.
KENNEDY: But what I can't get from you on that last sentence or two of morally not sustainable -- does that incline you to say that the country is going at some time to decide it wants to get out? That's one conclusion you could draw from what you say, Bob.
The second conclusion is that if you're right, and I know you are, that it's particular socioeconomic and regional groups which bear the brunt of the armed services personnel commitment, that the solution is to go for a broader or fairer distribution.
There's two ways of concluding from where you go. It's, should we be getting out discretely as we can, or should we be spreading onto many other shoulders the weight of carrying through this Iraq and other campaigns?
MERRY: I think you touched on it in a way that was more sharp than I did. Essentially, it boils down to what will the American people sustain?
And it's not clear to me that the American people will accept the draft unless there's a crisis that goes far beyond what we have in Iraq. Therefore, ultimately the question -- it sort of devolves back to your first point, which is -- and really, there's a couple of good examples here.
Number one, Stewart Alsop, when he covered the Vietnam War and the Washington part of Vietnam War, wrote some anguished columns about the draft -- the unfairness of the draft -- and how those of us who could go to college could avoid it and those who couldn't got swept up into it. And that's the situation, I think, that we're sort of seeing today in a little different guise.
But ultimately, it really becomes a question of what Bill Clinton faced when he wanted to move into the Balkans, for example, but realized that this was not a war that was tied to America's vital interest and therefore, he couldn't sustain casualties.
And that's one of the reasons why we had high-level bombing over the Kosovo situation, as opposed to anything that was going to sustain casualties because the American people wouldn't accept that. And I think he was -- I think he made a right calculation -- a political calculation -- on that.
And ultimately, the question is what will the American people sustain on these kinds of things?
KENNEDY: And then the flip side of that is what is it the American people will decide is vital enough to sustain?
The gentleman over there on our left and the right.
Yes, please sir?
QUESTIONER: Ross Butant (ph), New York University.
Mr. Chairman, this question is addressed to you.
About 20 years or so ago, you wrote an extremely popular book about the rise and fall of great powers in which, as I recall, you argued that imperial overstretch by great powers eventually produced their precipitous decline.
How would you see the present use and misuse of American power in the context of your ideas of that time?
KENNEDY: Thank you for the question. As presider tonight, I'm going to pass. CFR will have to bring me down from Yale in a few years time. I was careful enough in the final chapter of "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" to say I would come back to the prognostications in it in the year 2010. So I have still five years breathing space before I need to write the second edition. And I'm grateful for any further year I can get.
So excuse me, but I really think we should be throwing the questions at these three because they volunteered for this.
(Laughter.)
Yeah, I dodged the question. That's quite true.
Lady in the front?
QUESTIONER: Yes, Rita Hauser --
KENNEDY: Oh wait a minute. We've got --
QUESTIONER: Professor Kennedy, you asked a very cogent question. How do you decide what are the vital interests to which we should address our power.
KENNEDY: Yes. He is going to answer this.
QUESTIONER: And I find it remarkable that nobody refers to the collective security system which does exist -- that is, if the collectivity of countries in the security council decide it is a vital interest, which includes us, we then would go forward. And when it doesn't, certainly at a minimum, we shouldn't. And that's what, of course, happened in Iraq.
Have we given up on collective security? Every candidate says, as a given, America reserves the right to do whatever it chooses to do, whatever anybody else has to say, including the collective group. I find that remarkable. I'd like your comments on it.
WALT: I don't think that the collective security system has ever carried as much weight with American presidents or, for that matter, with the American electorate as we might like in some ideal world.
And as you just noted, if we didn't think it was in our interest, then we wouldn't support it within the Security Council anyway. So -- and further more, if we did think it was of vital interest, and the rest of the security council, didn't go along, we know what happens in that situation, too -- at least once.
(Off-mike commentary.)
Well, it was a mistake not just because we didn't get support in the Security Council. Even if we had gotten a vote in the Security Council, in my view, it would still have been a mistake, and we would still be in hot water there.
A more fundamental question, to which Paul alluded, is how do you define American vital interests, and how do you us American power around the world to try and advance those interests?
And again, I think we have, you know, some pretty obvious ones. I think we want to remain the dominant world power for as long as we can. I think we want to try, not via military means, to extend American values as we can. I think we want to maintain an open world economy and American economic and diplomatic power is critical to that. And then there's some sort of functional problems like controlling the spread of weapons of mass destruction and things like that that we want to devote American power to as well.
So it's not hard to develop a list of important or vital interests, but I'm not sure the Security Council's agenda, even if it's one that we can help fashion, is the way to identify those.
KENNEDY: Nancy, your work seemed to push more in a multilateralist direction in the sort of policies the U.S. government should be carrying out. Do you want to comment on that?
SODERBERG: You know, I look at it as a spectrum. You've got a -- on the one hand, any direct and vital threats to the United States -- a 9/11 -- we're going to invade Afghanistan whether we've got Security Council or not. And we actually did get it, but we would have gone whether we had it or not. That was the right thing to do -- another World War II, direct interests in Europe, direct threats to our (territory ?) -- we're going to move regardless.
And the chances are if we're right, we'll get the Security Council blessing, but no American president is going to say, well, I'm not going to move in that circumstance.
It's the middle ground in the far spectrum that gets more complicated. The middle ground is, well, they're a little bit more diffuse, and we need people to help us. Take the Balkans, for instance. Nine out of 10 soldiers today are not American in the Balkans today. The Europeans are handing it over. That's a good deal. And we didn't get Security Council authorization, but we did get contact group and most of the Europeans on board. And now they're -- would it have been better to get Security Council authorization? Yes. Should we not have gone because we didn't? No. It was clearly the right thing to do, although others may disagree with that, but I think -- and my sense that it was the right thing to do.
And then there's the far-out spectrum -- the humanitarian crises, primarily in Africa. Should we be putting American troops on the ground to stop the genocide in Darfur? Thirty thousand people a day are dying -- a month -- are dying in the Congo. Should we put troops there? That's where you have a more diffuse interest that probably does not justify American troops to go do it. You can justify American troops to help others to do it.
The Security Council right now is not up to the task of being the decider of collective security. As much as I wish they were, they are not, and if you look at the mess of the World Summit they can't even agree on what is the definition of terrorism, what's the use of force. They can't agree on any of that. So they're not ready yet. And it's not Kofi Annan's fault; it's that the nations have not evolved to the point where they're willing to support and stand out for what we would perhaps in this room agree was a collective security need to act. But others are more afraid about having the tables turned on them.
So I think you have to be patient for the world to catch up with the ideal of collective security, while looking at a spectrum where you're going to leverage your use of force and get others to come with us when we can, but go alone if it's a direct, vital interest.
KENNEDY: Bob Merry, would the flip side of your urging restraint and a ordering of U.S. strategic priorities across the globe -- would the flip side of that be your favoring international organizations and regional organizations because you don't want the U.S. go to in? So if there is an effective operation happening, like the Australian-led operation in East Timor, then that's a good thing from an American viewpoint because somebody else is carrying the (count ?).
Is that the way it goes?
MERRY: Absolutely, I want to say something about -- in response to what Nancy said when she noted that there are a lot of other ways to exercise power other than military power. And I agree with that on that -- I agree with her on that. And I think she's absolutely right.
I would favor a kind of a geopolitical approach that includes a lot of alliances or partial alliances based on certain interests and circumstances that would tie the United States to certain -- especially in this era where, I believe, that we are living in an era characterized by civilizational clash -- with the core states of the other civilizations, because I think that those core states are the key to whatever stability we can find in this kind of a world.
So absolutely, I think America needs to be in the world in a big way, and I think America needs to be grappling with the geopolitical forces and realities in every region of the world.
And I also think that America has to deal with tragedy around the world where it can. But I don't believe that it should expend American blood, which, as I say, I hold sacred, because of tragedies that occur in areas where instability has ruled.
KENNEDY: Okay. Let's come on with some more questions.
Sir? The mike is coming.
QUESTIONER: My name is Eugene Marans, Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton.
Another direction. Do you think that --
KENNEDY: Is this to any one of us?
QUESTIONER: Let's try my friend -- (inaudible).
KENNEDY: Yeah, Steve -- (inaudible).
QUESTIONER: Do you think that America is expending adequate resources through non-governmental organizations? Should there be a bigger role in the exercise of American influence through greater government and private support of non-governmental organizations?
WALT: I'm not sure. I actually -- I'd put it in slightly different terms. Should the United States be devoting more of its national wealth to a variety of other instruments of power other than the ones it's using? And there I'd say yes.
Just by way of comparison, in 1962, we spent about 1 percent of GNP on non-military, international affairs spending. So that's State Department, U.S. information agencies, things like that -- cultural programs -- one percent of GNP.
We now spend about .2 percent of GNP on that amount. So we spend 20 percent as a percentage of our national income, and I don't think that's the most important reason why the United States' image has plummeted around the world, but surely that has to be part of it.
So I'm not sure I would give it to NGOs necessarily, although I'd be aware of all the things that they're doing. But I would like to be giving it some other parts of the U.S. government.
One final issue there. The next time you're overseas, go take a look at an American embassy. American embassies look like fortresses now.
KENNEDY: You can't take a look.
(Laughter.)
WALT: Exactly. This is -- this is not the image that I think we want to be portraying.
Now, we know all the obvious reasons why the United States builds its embassies that way and protects them. But I sometimes wonder if we are paying a very large price in terms of the image we protect, that we are a fortress that essentially has to be defended from the outside world, and that's our public outreach in their own countries.
KENNEDY: Okay, let's keep. Oh, Nancy --
SODERBERG: I'd just add one point to that. The secretary-general of the U.N. has called for wealthy nations -- donor nations -- to give .7 percent of their gross national income to development as kind of a grand bargain that he put forward, which unfortunately was not endorsed, but I think that's the kind of the level that we're talking about. We're at, you know, .2 percent. We're not talking about enormous increases in aid. But even that .5 percent increase we're not in a position to do right now.
So I think -- your question is, we do need to do more, but if we're going to convince the developing world to get tough on terrorism and proliferation, we need to show some sign that we understand their concerns as well.
KENNEDY: I would put as a slip to that, if I may, come in for just half a sentence as the chair.
We also have to convince the American people that monies given through either bilateral or through multilateral organizations that they work, that they're not squandered. And it was a very, very common remark in the 1980s of Reagan Republicans and people like Jesse Helms that all of this was money -- American taxpayer's money -- going down a deep hole.
SODERBERG: A rat hole --
KENNEDY: And the fact was that they were 50 percent right and 50 percent wrong. That is to say there was a whole array of extraordinarily wonderful, usually micro projects, for which U.S. aid offered leverage and got things turned around, both environmentally and in terms of development of women's micro banks, et cetera.
And there were many, many instances of where the money went just into Africa or Latin America for a short while before it returned to Bermuda or the Bahamas or Swiss banks.
And therefore, the I always feel that you make the best argument for increasing our funding for the non-military dimensions of security if you can also make a strong argument for the practical use of the funds which are --
We can probably get another few questions in.
Yes, sir? Yes, please -- mike is coming. I've got to stop saying mike is coming. The microphone is coming.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. I'm Michael Oppenheimer at NYU.
KENNEDY: Michael.
QUESTIONER: Nancy, and anyone else who wants to volunteer, this process of defining American interests in a different way and presumably a more parsimonious or realistic way is a domestic political process or is -- will be the outcome of a domestic political process. And this is a changed America.
Dan Yankelovich had this very interesting piece in Foreign Affairs' last issue about the degree of polarization within the American electorate on foreign policy questions and attitudes.
I'm wondering whether the process of reestablishing a consensus on foreign policy goals won't be vastly complicated by the domestic situation, as Yankelovich in his poll depicted it and whether you can imagine -- what is the logical foreign policy output, if any, of a more deeply polarized country along party lines, religious lines, class lines? What does that look like?
SODERBERG: Well, this goes back to us being optimists. And I think in foreign policy if you're not an optimist, you can get up every morning, read the paper and commit harakiri. So I may be too optimistic about the world, but I feel that a lot of it is about leadership and visionary leadership coming from the White House.
American people want to do the right thing. They're altruistic; they want to be engaged, but they need leadership to sort of show them that it can be done and some wise decisions.
It's not surprising to me at all that Americans are confused. You have 9/11; then you had the war in Iraq where we're -- you know, Afghanistan -- all of these sacrifices that we have been asked to make aren't necessarily working to our advantage. They're scared about what's going to happen in the war in Iraq. Osama bin Laden is still out there on the Afghan-Pakistan border sending creepy messages. They've got $3 a barrel at the gas tank that they're paying for, and they don't see a way out of that.
And I think what -- the way to fix it is to, I think, to a certain extent what's already happening, is that the pendulum tends to -- you know, Americans are a conservative, centrist country. And the pendulum is -- you know, whether it swings to the left in some administrations or to the right, it ends up centering back in the middle, and I think that's what you're seeing happening now. The extremists and the -- we're not going to invade Syria. We're not going to bomb Iran. These kind of wild ideas that have been tossed around quite seriously, particularly by the vice president in the last few year, you don't hear about that anymore.
So I think you're already seeing a realistic policy. In my book I call it, you know, return to tough engagement, which is America, you know, acting when it has to, but bringing others when it can and working with the rest of the world to try and show them that we understand it.
And I think that you can be more optimistic about the direction it's moving in the Yankelovich polls because you can flip those views very quickly with the right policies.
WALT: Can I interject one brief note of pessimism on this one? I think one of the dangers of being in the position of power the United States is in -- even post Iraq, which will, I think, trim our wings a bit -- is it's very easy to convince yourself you've got the capability to do almost anything -- or at least to do an awful lot of things.
So, in fact, we no longer have that structure of the Cold War to discipline our thinking, to enforce a bipartisan consensus. So what we end up doing in foreign policy is whatever combination of interest groups and factions and people come up -- you know, manage to put together.
Again, you saw -- let's remember that, you know, we got -- the old line victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan, right? There were an awful lot of Democrats who thought invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Right? And I think you can challenge them for being gullible before the fact, but it was a combination of, you know, people who didn't like the human rights situation there, people who thought weapons of mass destruction were really in there, people who thought he could never be deterred, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
You can get those sorts of wacky coalitions down the road as well because again, when you're as big as we are, it's easy to think you can do more than you can.
MERRY: I might add something on that if I could?
KENNEDY: Oh, yes. I want you to, indeed.
MERRY: It's my observation, in terms of domestic politics and its impact on foreign affairs, that the American people largely delegate that to their leaders. It's not something that they go to the polls and vote on in terms of the forefront of their consciousness.
But there's a caveat to that that they say to the American leaders. And they say, don't screw it up. And as soon as they do -- and we've seen this many times in American history -- they take it back, and woe to those leaders who do screw it up.
And I think that's what we are seeing here. The American people basically said, well, we don't really know. Bush has made a case. We're going to give him -- because we delegate, we're going to give him the leeway to affect this policy, but he better not screw it up. My own view is that he has, and I think that that's what the American people ultimately are sort of coming to.
But I'll say one other thing. Given that the American people collectively delegate a foreign policy, it opens up an opportunity for ethnic, political factors to emerge and impinge upon it -- I think you were referring to this -- impinge upon the exercise of foreign policy decision-making. And there's a growing body of commentary regarding this in the last number of years -- 10, 15 years.
And I believe that that is something that bears very, very serious watching because I think it can be very, very potentially dangerous.
KENNEDY: I hadn't -- I didn't see the Yankelovich figures. I didn't study them, but I'm -- what you say concerns me. And this will be my final remark as chair here because if you put together Bob Merry's comments upon the way in which the personal and family contributions to the armed forces are slanted in particular regions, particular socioeconomic groups, then it seems that any move to get out of Iraq is going to cause profound discontent in those parts of the country -- already conservative, of course -- but in those parts of the country who felt that the sacrifice has been for nothing and been too great. And therefore, the frustration there could go in I'm not quite sure what directions.
But if your -- if Yankelovich is saying that according to the polls, we already have a sharp divide in foreign policy issues, on American power issues, which has been our theme tonight, and then the -- some decision is made on Iraq, whether it's to continue, to increase. You may have seen The Financial Times report today on the International Institute of Strategic Studies -- brand new report on will you be in there for years and years with large numbers of troops, or to pull out. Then those divisions may be even larger than they are at the present.
A last cent -- anything?
SODERBERG: Well, I mean, I think on Iraq we are there for the foreseeable future. I don't know about a decade, but certainly I think it will work, but at great cost to us. But I think in the larger picture, Iraq has proven the danger of going it alone and sort of not sort of stopping and thinking things through if there are alternatives.
And the good news, if there is some -- not for the soldiers who are going to lose their lives in Iraq, but for the others -- is we are now more realistic about where we can deploy troops and I think beginning to get things back on the right track.
So Iraq is what it is at this point. We broke it; we own it, as Tom Friedman likes to say.
But the good news is we're not going to repeat that mistake, I think, in the next few years. I think we are beginning to use American power more wisely and get back to a realistic policy. So there's a little silver lining in that message.
KENNEDY: Good. Good silver linings. We need them desperately.
Steve anything?
WALT: Two points. I'm going to part company with Nancy on that.
KENNEDY: One point.
WALT: I don't think we'll be in Iraq years from now, not in any sizeable numbers because the U.S. Army, National Guard and Reserves cannot sustain that level of deployment for more than another 12, 18 months, something like that. We'll have a broken military if we try to do that, so we will, in fact, get out, and I think we'll see that as a defeat.
And I want to go back to the very first question that was asked and remind everybody of a word that is now unpopular in America, and it's called accountability. And it would be nice if the parties responsible for this were held accountable, and that's not the men and women in uniform.
KENNEDY: Okay. I -- we -- actually the Schlieffen Plan's worked well tonight -- (inaudible). Two minutes late in getting to the English Channel in Calais, and we have reached the end of our session here tonight.
Ladies and gentlemen, I want, before people start moving, to thank on your behalf the three panelists, the three authors. They are just dying to sign their books outside if you haven't got a copy already.
I want to thank them for being such good sports and interlocutors. I want to thank you for coming.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
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